opposed not only to the State: they were opposed to the Church. They
tried to abolish God, they tried to abolish the Ten Commandments; they
tried to abolish everything that had been so long established and
associated with the old regime.

Were the people really enemies of God? Were they enemies of religion?
Were they enemies of truth? No: it was a caricature of God that they
were fighting, it was a caricature of religion that they were opposed
to. When Voltaire declared that the Church was infamous, it was not
religion that he wished to overthrow: it was this tyranny that had been
associated with the dominance of the Church for so many ages.

This is the result in one direction of attempting to hold back the
natural growth and progress of the world. If you read the history of
the Church for the last fifteen hundred years until within a century or
two, and by the Church I mean that organization that has claimed to
speak infallibly for God, you will find that it has been associated
with almost everything that has hindered the growth of the world. I
cannot go into details to illustrate it. It has interfered with the
world's education. There is only one nation in Europe to-day where
education has not been wrenched out of the hands of the priesthood in
the interests of man, and that even by Catholics themselves; and that
country is Spain. It pronounced its ban on the study of the universe
under the name of science. It made it a sin for Galileo to discover the
moons of Jupiter. And Catholic and Protestant infallibility alike
denounced Newton, one of the noblest men and the grandest scientists
that the world has ever seen, because in proclaiming the law of
gravity, they said, he was taking the universe out of the hands of God
and establishing practical atheism.